Sufjan Stevens Stands in No Man’s Land

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Author: Aralyn Beaumont

After a four-year hiatus from performing in Los Angeles, musical mastermind Sufjan Stevens brought an audio and visual spectacle to the city of angels to promote his new album “The Age of Adz.”

On the second sold-out night, The Wiltern was pitch black as the show began with a cacophony of instrumentals. Slowly, as lights illuminated the stage, Stevens jumped into “Seven Swans” from his 2004 album of the same name. The banjo-oriented song created an intimate atmosphere that contrasted with the upbeat and complex nature of the rest of the set.

Intense light shows, whimsical animated shorts and provocative videos – which looked as if an American Apparel ad had come to life – were projected onto the backdrop of the stage during the songs from “The Age of Adz” and “All Delighted People.”

What was especially obscure was the robotic dancing of Stevens and his two backup vocalists, who doubled as backup dancers dressed in space-like costumes. The rest of the 10-piece backing band, which consisted of two drummers, a pianist, two wind instrumentalists and three musicians who alternated between keyboards and guitars, appeared quite normal.

Stevens explained that much of his new album abandoned his typical narrative approach to songwriting for what he called a more “sound-oriented structure” that heavily utilized synthesizers. This new sound was glaringly obvious upon listening to “The Age of Adz,” but it wasn’t until I saw the live show that I began to love the new album.

After Stevens played “Too Much,” he explained that the song was about “heartbreak” and “the end of love.” That and “I Walked,” two songs that explicitly reference love, were heavy with synthesizer and strangely poppy from a musician renowned for his classical compositions, but the live production was enticing and euphonic.

Songs like “Heirloom,” “The Owl and the Tanager” and “Enchanting Ghost” were scattered throughout the set. Their calm and alluring arrangements created a relief between Stevens’ other songs. The three songs are from the “All Delighted People” EP, released just months prior to “The Age of Adz.” These quieter songs mirrored the opening of the set and reminded the crowd that the classical Stevens still exists despite the eccentricity of his new album.

Stevens prefaced the busy and whimsical “Get Real Get Right” with a tangent on the 20th-century Louisiana artist Royal Robertson, who served as a huge inspiration to Stevens over the past year. Robertson was mentally ill in the later part of his life, and it almost seems as though Stevens channeled the man’s schizophrenia in his music.

“Impossible Soul” is an ambitious 25-minute song that Stevens calls his “magnum opus.” It could easily be separated into four different songs, but Stevens’ musical expertise and stimulating performance kept the crowed delightedly enthralled.

The beginning of the song sounds like it could be from Stevens’ earlier albums “Greetings from Michigan” or “Come on Feel the Illinoise,” but eight minutes in, the song breaks off into a two-minute silence. Stevens’ synthesized voice then emerges, and a strange club-like pop song ensues for the next 10 minutes. For these 10 minutes, Stevens’ emulates a hip-hop artist, singing into the microphone like Eminem while sporting an upside-down neon visor and neon sunglasses. The backup singers and dancers threw glitter around the stage and shared in a dance-off with Stevens. The end of the song was a toned-down version of the beginning, which brought the crowd back from the alien experience that Stevens previously created.

His tendency to create epic songs was heard in “Age of Adz” and “Vesuvius,” in which a multitude of instruments accompanied angelic harmonies. Such songs manifest the magnitude of Stevens’ captivating composition skills. The audience’s love for these songs was apparent when the opening notes of “Chicago” rang throughout the theater and everyone jumped to their feet. As Stevens sang of traveling in a van with a friend, a black-and-white video of a coiling street trailing out of the back of a van was displayed on the backdrop of the stage.

Ending the set with this 2005 hit from “Come on Feel the Illinoise” sent the crowd into a thundering applause, clearly impatient for the encore.

The encore continued the trip down “Illinoise” lane with “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois,” “Casimir Pulaski Day” and “Jacksonville.” For “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois,” Stevens came on-stage by himself and played quietly at the piano. A tranquility fell over the audience until Stevens stumbled slightly over his lyrics during “Casimir Pulaski Day,” which he made even more obvious by exclaiming, “Whoops!” Fortunately, the falter provided some comic relief in the midst of such depressing songs.

Old songs full of somber narratives and beautiful arrangements framed the bipolar and eccentric set that Stevens played at the Wiltern, creating a spectrum of experiences – but what else could be expected from a musical genius and self-proclaimed “dramatic?”

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